Emad and Dave on friction, ten-person companies, and vertical integration

Yeah. I mean, look, if you take your commentary to the end point, then you end up with what Dario was talking about, where one company like Anthropic will be all private enterprise, right? Um, and that's unlikely to happen. It'll take a while, and at that point the concept of what does it mean to have an economy essentially evolved. I think the bigger picture question is, where do we even have value creation and value storage and all of this, because we come down to the money layer at some point.

And we should have Jeff Booth on — we were talking about guests earlier. We should have Jeff on talking about what the future of that —

Those are old tokens.

Emad, I see you — I see you ready to burst forward.

Yeah. No, I think that the economy is like 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Like, you don't need a polymath doing your taxes or selling widgets or things like that. Like, we've seen that obviously the Navier-Stokes model can sell widgets very well, but once it comes up with a recipe, it's actually about following through.

And most transaction costs are actually about friction. Like the economy needs a bit of friction. It's the relationships you build, it's the other things. It's not an instant thing whereby there are no barriers to spreading. Again, Sam talked about this, the frictions in a scarcity-oriented economy. It's not a case that the best product always wins, or we'd all be on Betamax, you know, like — that's something for the old kind of kids. That's Betamax for Americans.

What's that, Emad? Never heard of it.

Young kids anyway. So, you know, like there are lots of frictions in the economy. So I don't think it will be that case. It's just that the companies and organizations become more efficient and then they become more optimized, because it's really annoying when you go past 12 people and then past 150 people. This is where you kind of have that Carthaginian demon of disorder [unclear] coming into organizations and they get misaligned. So I don't think you'll see the one-person company. I think you'll see the 10-person company, and I think you will see more collectives of companies operating with digital and physical humans solving problems that deliver value. But economics fundamentally does need to flip from being scarcity-based to being abundance-based, because we can rearrange bits and soon atoms in any way that we want.

All right, Dave, do you want to close us out? Any thoughts?

Well, I think, to step back from the academic, you know, our company's getting bigger, our company's getting smaller — clearly, Mercor now has what, 50 to 100,000 individual actors that are effectively little companies in India and around Brazil now too. Uh, and you can take what Salim is saying and build a marketplace around it to deal with just the lingering artifacts, like, you know, employment law in different countries, and make a fortune by taking advantage of the trend that Salim is describing.

And concurrently with that, Elon is building the single biggest integrated vertical company that the world has ever seen, with complete supply chain control all the way down to raw sand turning into chips. And so those are both happening in the real world concurrently. So I think maybe the real observation here is things are changing very, very rapidly in both directions for very good reasons, and, you know, the academic paper can wax poetic for years, but this is happening in the real world in those two flavors and it's brilliant.

I agree — agree with you.